Tag: mobile ads

The company’s assets have now been acquired for $4.5 million by SITO mobile.

Recent reports have shown that the Bellevue, Washington based mobile marketing company, Hipcricket, has now filed for bankruptcy as an independent company and that SITO Mobile has now acquired its assets for $4.5 million.

Hipcricket filed for bankruptcy protection, last week, despite its 21 U.S. patents and $26.7 million in annual revenues.

SITO Mobile was quick to recognize the opportunity and acquired all of the mobile marketing firm’s assets. According to its CEO, Jerry Hug, “Consistent with our goal to accelerate our growth, if completed, the acquisition of Hipcricket will bolster our services and solutions and increase our revenue from a customer base which would then include 38 of the Fortune 100 companies.”

The Hipcricket mobile marketing company’s press release announced that acquisition was its best direction.

In the release the CEO of Hipcricket, Todd Wilson, explained that selling its assets in a court-approved agreement was “the most viable option to protect our human capital and maximize recovery for our stakeholders.” Filing for bankruptcy was a decision that the company made in order to “facilitate the sale”.

The press release explained that throughout the process of filing for Chapter 11, as well as during the acquisition process, Hipcricket believes that its typical daily operations will remain the same, subject to the “first day” motions approval by the Court. Hipcricket is also working to obtain approval from the Court in order to be able to keep up its current payroll and benefits program, in addition to maintaining the cash management system that is already in place. It wants to be able to keep up its typical daily business activities.

To make it possible for the company to keep up those operations throughout the acquisition period, the press release explained that SITO Mobile has agreed to provide debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing of up to $3.4 million to Hipcricket. All of this, of course, is subject to court approval, but at the time of the writing of this article, those were the intentions of the two companies that are involved in this acquisition.

ZipDial has now become the social network’s first acquisition from that country, in a sizeable purchase.

Twitter has now made its first acquisition of an Indian company, in the form of a mobile marketing firm called ZipDial, which was purchased for what was reported to be in the area of $30 to $40 million.

This considerably boosts the investment that Twitter has made in India, which has massive growth potential.

ZipDial is a mobile marketing and analytics startup that is based in Bangalore. A the time that this article was written, no terms for this acquisition had been released. However, TechCrunch, the technology website, had been displaying a report that had suggested that anonymous sources had quoted the aforementioned amount for the purchase. The acquisition greatly enhances the investment that Twitter has in India, which is one of the nations in which the social network is currently experiencing sizeable growth.

The mobile marketing acquisition also establishes a new engineering office for Twitter, in Bangalore.

ZipDial was originally founded in 2010. It provides its customers with phone numbers that can be incorporated into marketing campaigns. It works when consumers phone these numbers, but hang up (as a missed call) before they are actually connected, thereby avoiding any charges or minutes usage. In return, they receive a mobile ads via text message, which contain promotions from which they can benefit.

This type of mobile advertising communication functions especially well in areas where cell phone connections aren’t all that reliable, or where they don’t necessarily have access to data connections.

According to the Twitter VP of product, Christian Oestlien, it won’t be long before there will be billions of additional internet users who have come online for their very first time, in countries such as India, Indonesia, and Brazil. He added that “For many, their first online experience will be on a mobile device – but the cost of data may prevent them from experiencing the true power of the Internet. Twitter, in partnership with ZipDial, can make great content more accessible to everyone.”

ZipDial’s mobile marketing platform has engaged almost 60 million users, to date, and boasts hundreds of marketer and brand clients.